


Wayside

by SkadizzleRoss



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bobby's House, Gen, Paternal Bobby Singer, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 17:27:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1907571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkadizzleRoss/pseuds/SkadizzleRoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post 5x22. Call it moving on if you like, but that ain't quite what it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wayside

 

Gutters’re clogged. First thing he notices, pulling in. Judging by the gulley cut into the dirt beneath the northeast corner, they’ve been that way awhile. Hubcaps are out of order, that’s the second thing. And there _is_ an order, by god. Was, anyway. There’s an order to the whole damn yard, even if no one else is bright enough to fathom it.

Dean’s gray as the sky overhead, eyes set on someplace else. Bobby reels him into a hug and thinks maybe, this time, the months’ll pass into something better. Then he lets him go.

Third thing, that’s the chains on the gate. Too rusted to be much good anymore, though iron’s iron. He stands there futzing with the chains, and doesn’t see the old Chevy turn out onto the main road.

Fourth thing’s the loose board on the porch. He sets his heel in deep and the board gives with a groan, soft, too soft. Termites, likely. Last thing the old house needs. Weather-stripping around the door, that needs work, and the salt worked into the threshold could use a replacement. There’s a leak in the roof somewhere, getting through the attic; he’d seen the mold while he was searching for a book up in the back storeroom. Desk lamp’s got a loose wire. CIA phone’s starting to go. Fridge compressor’s going with it. There’s something rotting in the sink. Answering machine’s squalling out a ‘Full’ warning. A demon’s sullied all his whiskey glasses. There’s no food in the cabinets, three beers left in the fridge, he’s running low on hard liquor-- and still the first thing he lays his hands on is the books.

They’re sitting on the dining room table, arranged into three stacks - the classification lost with the man who classified them. His notes are still there, right beneath the pen he scratched them out with. Bobby folds the sheets of legal paper in half, but once he has, he doesn’t know where to put them. So he slips them into the pages of a book on Enochian, stacks the books together on the table’s edge, and leaves the matter at that.

Then there’re the beds.

The cot in the study, his bed for the last handful of months, is no dilemma: that gets folded up and left to rot in the far corner of the basement. The mattress in the storage room, the one an angel’d slept on a few times, he pulls the sheets off that and lays it up against the wall. Strips the upstairs guest bed, the one Dean always saved just enough energy to reach, and when he’s done there he shakes the dust from his own comforter to boot. He spends a good half-an-hour hunting down the fresh linens, but he never gets around to making up more than his own bed.

There’s an extra pillow under the couch, rolled up pin-neat in an army blanket. Ever since Sam got that extra leg to him – so, hell, ever since the kid hit puberty – that’d been his place of choice, six-and-a-half feet for stretching and various stacks of books within reach. Once in every dozen times, when the bed was a flight of stairs too far, Dean would be there asleep beside him, a pillow and a bedroll between him and the floor.

That extra pillow, he forgets about. Slips right out of his mind, more or less.

The sheets he sets out in a neat-enough stack at the foot of the guest bed.

The books he shelves away – and yes, there’s an order to that, too.

Then he goes to see about those damn gutters.

 

Fin.


End file.
